“This afternoon, the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill will be debated during its second reading in the House of Commons.”

One of the purposes of this bill is to redraw constituency boundaries so they are of more equal size than at present. At the moment, constituency irregularities favour the Labour Party.

The HT post continues:

History Today contributor Tristram Hunt criticised the bill in yesterday’s Financial Times describing it as ‘a bill that places utility above tradition, separates people from place and past, and ruptures the unwritten constitution in order to hold a coalition together’.

Tristram Hunt is a Labour MP. I can find no trace of him objecting to the imposition of unfamiliar European regions on people who feel of their county, nor of his protests when Labour ruptured the unwritten constitution in an attempt to gerrymander permanent Labour majorities in Wales and Scotland while allowing Labour votes from those places to affect the majority-conservative English.

Tristram Hunt is a Labour MP. That’s more relevant to the reader of the HT post than his status as an occasional contributor. The magazine gives the impression Hunt’s objections are scholarly, when they are in fact political.

History Today has failed to provide relevant disclosure. They also refused to pass my extremely polite comment pointing this out, ensuring that new readers might remain unaware of Hunt’s lack of detachment on this issue. The headline about the 1970s can only be intended to be disparaging to Cameron.

Geoffrey Elton used to argue that history is a bulwark against tyranny, because it cultivates the habits of questioning, interrogating prose for bias, refusing to believe what you are told. He’d be hard pressed to make that argument today.

*These inveterate defenders of incumbents and of established institutions, these unapologetic diverters of cash from ordinary people to the elite and their underclass dependants, cannot reasonably be described as left wing.

Cedric the Tasmanian Devil has died. Or perhaps I should say, Cedric has been killed. He was deliberately introduced to Devil Facial Tumour Disease, an aggressively infectious, fatal cancer that is threatening to make the Devils go the way of the Thylacine, or Tasmanian Tiger, which probably became extinct in the 1930s (some sightings are still occasionally reported but none has been substantiated). Cedric showed some early signs of resistance to the disease, but succumbed at the age of 6, euthanised when it became clear the cancer had spread internally. The search for a vaccine, or even a clue to how resistance might be cultivated in the species, continues.

Marsupial species are very fragile, competing poorly with mammals in their various niches. Human movement has made island sanctuaries like Tasmania far less safe for these remnants of a branch of life that once populated Australia and South America with giants. I’m not whinging about that, it’s a fact of life, but humans can do something to help. The research that took Cedric’s life might just save his species.

The basic conservative impulse is to bow down and show total allegiance to authority. This obviously links up with the old cliche about right-wing women (like Rand) being especially passionate about worshipping strong males, which is incidentally why they’re said to be so great in bed. This could be one possible explanation for those reportedly overheard sounds that suggested “an animal being killed.”

I couldn’t possibly comment.

See comments – Ross points out it’s disappeared, but it’s still in Google cache.

The best bug in the world, according to Alex Harrowell’s Gmail status. He might be right.

http://howfuckedismydatabase.com/ – especially this page.

A cannibal restaurant in Berlin. “Donors wanted.”

Possibly the best airline in the world.

Are tests biased against students who don’t give a shit?